D. Recording Video and Sound with Bttv

In addition to the applications referenced in Section 5, recording can be managed from the command line. The issues discussed here with regard to sound capture deal only with the default kernel-2.6 and higher sound system: the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture.

The easy part is grabbing the video, for which we will use streamer, available with the Xawtv suite. Sound is another matter, however. You will need to access your mixer settings using amixer, the ALSA command-line mixer that should be available in the ALSA-tools package available from your Linux distributor. See man amixer to follow the command line options.

Your recording can be managed either using your primary soundcard if you have your Bt8x8 audio output connected to a mixer conduit that allows for capture (e.g. the 4-pin analog CDROM input slot), or the Bt8x8 card itself using the btaudio module. The following steps utilize the latter. First, identify the individual cards on your system (requires /proc filesystem):